Whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to Pakistan to attend the Saarc summit later this year will be a “policy decision” and a call will be taken at the “right time”, government sources said on Wednesday night. “At least talk to the people in Kashmir”.
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Rather he commented, “Problem with Pakistan is centrality of issue of terrorism”.
The Congress, however, distanced itself officially from Khurshid and backed the Prime Minister’s stand on countering Pakistan by raising the Balochistan issue. On Monday, Modi accused Pakistan of supporting and glorifying terrorism, while calling on Islamabad to worry about its affairs instead of interfering in other countries’ internal matters.
Sedition charges have been used in the past against supporters of independence for Kashmir, which is divided between India and Pakistan but claimed in full by both.
Modi had said that people of Balochistan, Gilgit, Pakistan Occupied Kashmir have thanked him for drawing attention to their troubles.
In a worrying escalation the previous day, Indian security forces fired live rounds at a crowd of stone-throwing protesters in Kashmir’s Baramulla district, killing five and wounding 10.
“We have been asking the government to find a political solution to the Kashmir issue”.
Kashmir is at the centre of a decades-old rivalry between India and Pakistan, which also rules its northern part, and backed an insurgency in the late 1980s and 1990s that Indian security forces largely crushed.
But a pull-aside meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris between Modi and Sharif resulted in a meeting in Bangkok between the two national security advisers. The former foreign minister went on to add that no Indian premier had spoken about Balochistan from the ramparts of the Red Fort, warning there will be a fallout of the act.
However, the momentum built up in December was disrupted by an attack by Islamist militants on India’s Pathankot air force base on 2 January.
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“Terrorism issue has become so central to the relationship that it makes the ties hard to grow”, the Foreign Secretary said. The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said in Berlin today that he has been working to get observers to the parts of the disputed region since violence flared last month. “Pakistan has a different view of South Asia and uses terrorism as a state policy”.
